Some songs and sounds stick with you forever, and you never get sick of them. This, for me, is one of those songs.
Mazzy Star were (still are, in fact) a duo - Hope Sandoval and David Roback (ex-Rain Parade) - who started off together in a band called Opal, with Kendra Smith (ex-Dream Syndicate) as lead vocalist. When Smith left, abruptly - like, slammed her guitar on the ground during a gig and left - Sandoval took over lead vocals to finish the tour.
After that tour ended, the two of them formed Mazzy Star. Mazzy Star had a minor hit song in 1993 - "Fade Into You". This is not that song. This song is from their influential and tone-setting 1990 debut album, She Hangs Brightly. Kurt Cobain called the album one of his favorites of all time.
Hope Sandoval is notoriously shy during live shows - she performs only under dim lighting and interacts little with the crowd. You can kind of hear it in this song. That's the best description I can give for this haunting song, one I list among my favorite songs of all time.
The band is actually still together. They released their fourth album in 2013, and had reformed for a couple of tours before that. Here's a performance from 2012, where you can see the dim lighting.
You know, now that Scott Colvin doesn't write for this blog, we have a lot less country. (Yes, I know - I posted this last week. That was the first country I had posted in a year, at least.)
Over the next several weeks, I am looking to remedy that. We start with a song about the woman at a Nashville bank who was trying to take care of Dolly Parton's husband while she was on the road. As the story goes, Jolene (probably not her real name) the bank clerk knew damn well the song was about her, and yeah, there was a catfight.
Dolly kept her man. And also had a huge hit single that branched her into both pop music and the UK pop charts.
As an added bonus, here's a live duet version of the song that Dolly did with her goddaughter.
Did I mention her goddaughter happens to be Miley Cyrus? (If you read Totally Covered, you already knew that, and that Miley does a pretty damn good version of the song herself)
I have to be honest. I like myself a little less for liking this song.
But I think that's the point. It's somewhat narcisistic..... but, most likely, M-Train was going for positive image. Which makes it ironic that the original video for this song was Photoshopped to make her look thinner. Ridiculously, by the way.
It's a pretty simply constructed song, really. And still, it's got a nice beat. So I will appreciate it.
With her new album out, I've been on a Sia kick lately. And for the big hit that this song was, it was completely underappreciated, even by me. So I decided to give it a second look.
And you know what? It's full of raw emotion, like a lot of her music. It's smart and full of interesting metaphor, like a lot of her music. And she's got a huge voice to carry the song, like all of her music.
I have to open up with this: I have serious misgivings about this post.
SERIOUS.
This is a sharp departure from any of her previous work. In fact, I absolutely hated this..... until I went back and listened to the Icona Pop theft, and realized that, although this is far MORE heavy electronica than we've heard, it's still Charli. And it's still good to see her making more music.
